Has a fine post up today:
Why America Needs Less Mindless Conformity
Think about it for a second. If you are in Washington, D.C.’s Republican/Democratic Establishment circles, it is considered nothing short of disgusting or fringe to think we should, for instance, set an exit strategy in Iraq, or renegotiate the corporate-written “free” trade deals that are wreaking so much havoc on our middle class. If you are in business, you are considered weird for keeping in mind anything other than the bottom line, no matter what laws and ethics you have to break. If you are in media, you are considered a freak if you suggest reporting on serious issues instead of Michael Jackson, if you suggest putting on air anyone other than the same tired, old, out-of-touch Beltway pundits who regurgitate the same idiotic talking points. But as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford tells us, conformity is exactly what the powers that be want – and is exactly what we shouldn’t give them.
I would add to that list that there are certain bloggers only too willing to tell us what we should all recognize as facts, what connections we should all make in this time of chaos. More with the Morford he links to below.
crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter
As Morford puts it:
Why Do You Work So Hard?
Is it maybe time to quit your safe job and follow your path and infuriate the establishment?
There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven.
This is the American Puritan work ethos, still alive and screaming and sucking the world dry. Work is the answer. Work is also the question. Work is the one thing really worth doing and if you’re not working you’re either a slacker or a leech, unless you’re a victim of BushCo’s budget-reamed America and you’ve been laid off, and therefore it’s OK because that means you’re out there every day pounding the pavement looking for work and honing your resume and if you’re not, well, what the hell is wrong with you?
It infects everything. It has disabled the Democratic Party as a party that is actually able to work for a world where people can pursue their happiness, where families and people and art and beauty and the environment matter. Even on blogs, this conventional wisdom seeks to silence inconvenient points-of-view, to bury people who’re making different connections between things than the accepted “reality based” connections.
Morford continues:
Our culture allows almost no room for creative breaks. There is little tolerance for seeking out a different kind of “work” that doesn’t somehow involve cubicles and widening butts and sour middle managers monitoring your e-mail and checking your Web site logs to see if you’ve wasted a precious 37 seconds of company time browsing blowfish.com or reading up on the gay marriage apocalypse.
We are at once infuriated by and enamored with the idea that some people can just up and quit their jobs or take a leave of absence or take out a loan to go back to school, how they can give up certain “mandatory” lifestyle accoutrements in order to dive back into some seemingly random creative/emotional/spiritual endeavor that has nothing to do with paying taxes or the buying of products or the boosting of the GNP. It just seems so … un-American. But it is so, so needed.
It is vital that the cultural left fight harder for a country where people CAN drop out to “follow their bliss”. Or to create something or just succor the needs of someone who needs help, without it always having to feed into the puritanism.
We are designed, weaned, trained from Day 1 to be productive members of society. And we are heavily guilted into believing that must involve some sort of droning repetitive pod-like dress-coded work for a larger corporate cause, a consumerist mechanism, a nice happy conglomerate.
But the truth is, God, the divine true spirit loves nothing more than to see you unhinge and take risk and invite regular, messy, dangerous upheaval. This is exactly the energy that thwarts the demons of stagnation and conservative rot and violent sanctimonious bloody Mel Gibson-y religion, one that would have all our work be aimed at continuously patching up our incessant potholes of ugly congenital guilt, as opposed to contributing to the ongoing orgiastic evolution of spirit.
Don’t let “them”, whoever they are, shout you down or shut you up or tell you you’re being silly. Believe something to be true? Then TEST it by writing or saying it, then engage with people who disagree with you. Be willing to reach out and touch an intellectual or spiritual hot stove. Be willing to be burned. LEARN from getting burned.
As Sirota writes:
In the movie “The Usual Suspects,” Kevin Spacey says “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Likewise, the greatest trick the insulated Establishment and Corporate America ever pulled was convicing ordinary Americans they can’t change things, they can’t make a difference, and they must become just another cog in a directionless corporate system that ignores anything other than the quest for profit and the desire to make more “things” (whatever they may be). It just isn’t true – and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we will be on our way to really addressing the fundamental challenges facing this country.
Our current political straits, and the ineffectual nature of the Democratic Party, is the continued blind acceptance of what “everybody knows”.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died — Leonard Cohen
Don’t give in to what everybody knows. Keep questioning. Keep making mistakes. Keep learning.